bioware Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Veilguard Stuck the Landing

November 18, 2024 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal and finished Dragon Age Veilguard. This morning I am going to attempt to walk a narrow line of talking about the events of the game without going into a lot of details. There are absolutely going to be spoilers, but I am going to try my best not to spoil exact plot decisions. I will however talk about some of the general decisions that will influence the ending that you can get. From what I can tell based on some research this morning, I seem to have managed to land upon the “best” ending. There is no “New Game Plus” mode so that is probably going to influence how fast I end up replaying this game since there is no easy path to just make different story decisions.

One of the decisions with this game that I was less than happy about, was the lack of an ability to import your Inquisitor. This was a thing that happened in previous incarnations of Dragon Age and I have played through the entire sequence importing my previous save and rolling my decisions forward. This legitimately was one of the coolest experiences because it almost always opened up options that you could not get any other way. However Veilguard is a game where there is a very clear canon set of choices made by the Inquisitor, and without that, some of the flow of the plot of the game would not function at all. You are given control over what your character looks like, but I chose a default appearance because quite honestly… I knew it was not MY Inquisitor.

One of my favorite aspects of the game however is the characters. There was a lot of spite floating around about this game and I don’t get it. The characters are all beautifully crafted and if you do not love Manfred the skeleton you have no soul. Similarly, Assan the Griffon is amazing and the best baby boy. The thing is having effectively completed all of the companion quests and quite honestly all of the side quests… the characters are amazingly well-crafted and deeply multi-dimensional. If anything… this is quite possibly the most Dragon Age game out there because for me it was always about the character interactions and never about what sort of combat was present in the game. These are games about friendship and romance set against the tapestry of a really interesting world. Veilguard delivers on all of those levels.

Another aspect of the game that I really enjoyed is how it handles romance in general. Effectively all of the characters in this game are bisexual/pansexual and can be romanced from any flavor of player character. However, the act of becoming a couple ends up happening pretty early at least compared to other Bioware games, and this has some really interesting ramifications. This frees up the other characters in the game to begin to develop their own relationships. I am not entirely certain how many NPC on NPC romance options there are, but I was given the choice to encourage other characters that obviously have chemistry to go for it, and this was super good. The thing is… the platonic options are way better than they are in other games and it felt like I was able to shape the lives of my companions more than I would normally be able to.

There is a loss in this game that cannot be avoided. The seasoned Bioware player in me tries to chart a course that allows me to save everyone. This is going to be a massive spoiler but even in a perfectly played game… you are going to lose one of your companions. The very first decision that you are asked to make in the lead-up to the final conflict… is going to lead to that companion never returning to your party. All of the other decisions are a combination of how well-suited they are for the mission you are assigning them to, and whether or not you fully unlocked that companion’s potential by completing the final chapter of their story arc. Similar to Mass Effect, if you do not go into the final mission with full companion strength and have completed all of the quests for the factions, you are going to lose more than that single required character. Essentially the first decision of who leads the second team is a Virmire-style question.

Another aspect of Veilguard that I greatly appreciate is how clear it is in messaging that you are entering the point of no return. You are given this screen indicating how prepared you are for the final battle. More than that however you are given a warning well before this point that things are getting close to the final phase. I’m the type of Bioware player that farms down every side quest possible before moving the main plot forward because I have learned the hard way that often those options will change or be removed when the world state changes. However, Veilguard is painfully clear about what you are getting yourself into before you actually embark upon that point of no return. Another thing that I really love is that the game is constantly telling you when you have reached a critical decision that is going to have lasting effects. More than that it also reminds you HOW you received this side plot point and what decision you made previously it was based upon.

Quite possibly the best part about Veilguard though is the way in which the plot wraps up. Remember how epic the final assault on Earth felt in Mass Effect 3? What if you had a game that managed to keep that same level of hype all the way through to the conclusion without fumbling it at the goal line? That is pretty much Veilguard because the final assault on Minrathos feels amazing and is filled with so many visuals that I legitimately do not want to spoil here so I am giving you the most general shot instead. The ending is satisfying in a way that Mass Effect 3 never was, and quite honestly… Veilguard would feel like a fitting conclusion to the entire Dragon Age series if it needed to be. The game as a whole expands upon the known lore of the series and wraps up so many elements in a nice little bow at the end. It reminds me of the way that Endwalker neatly wrapped up a decade’s worth of gameplay in its single final act. Dragon Age lore nerds are eating well.

This game has gotten so much bad press but honestly… I don’t get it. It makes me question if any of these folks were actually Dragon Age fans at all. What game series have they been playing up until this point, it certainly is not the series I have been playing. Veilguard is quite possibly the MOST Dragon Age game I have played in the series and legitimately makes me want to go back and play the other games again knowing where things are going to wind up. If you cannot find something that you love in this game then you have no heart. This is quite possibly my game of the year, and that comes from having just wrapped up Final Fantasy XVI right before this… and that in itself was a freaking amazing game. If you’ve ever played a Bioware game trying to engineer the perfect ending, or with the perfect romance options… then this game was created for you.

I know this post is riddled with spoilers, but I tried my best to talk about the conclusion of the game without going into a bunch of details. I have no clue if that was successful.

Veilguard is Pretty Great

November 4, 2024 by Belghast

Hey Folks! On Friday I talked a little bit about my very early experiences starting a new character in Dragon Age The Veilguard… or I as I seem to keep shortening it to just Veilguard. There was a heap of negative press surrounding this game ahead of its launch and if you spend time on Reddit or YouTube you would be convinced that this is quite possibly the worst game on the planet. Ignore these voices and press forward if you were someone who enjoyed Dragon Age in the past and just want more fun adventures with eventual romance options. It has been wild how every internet pundit seems to be screaming about this game… but all of my actual friends who are playing it seem to be enjoying themselves. If you want to watch a video that is not hyperbolic I recommend this one from my friend Dusty. I’m roughly twenty hours into the game at this point and am going to attempt to give you a low-spoiler discussion about what I like and dislike so far.

Probably my single favorite aspect of the game is that during character creation you are asked to make a choice between six different factions. These factions all play important roles in the story and aligning your character with one of them, also presents a bunch of unique options that play out during a single play-through of the game because of how your character was aligned before the events of Veilguard. I’ve been wanting to play another Grey Warden ever since the second game, and of course, I absolutely chose that path going into Veilguard. I’ve seen so many quest options that only really make sense because I am a Grey Warden, and I am certain that choosing any of the factions will have similar ramifications on your time spent with the story. This means that at a minimum there should be six different really interesting playthroughs of the game before it starts to feel a bit stale. One of my criticisms of Cyberpunk 2077 was how the origins only really made a difference at the very beginning of the game, but this seems to keep pushing forward with the story.

Another thing that I really dig is that as soon as you have completed the first mission in the game and have your base of operations, you have access to the Mirror of Transformation. This allows you to edit your character’s appearance completely at any time. Dusty talked a bit about this in his video, but there have been many times that an option that I chose during the character creator looked cool at the time… but annoyed me after seeing three hundred cutscenes. For example, I had some weird facial tattoos going on with my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 and they annoyed me from that point forward. Similarly in Inquisition my first character just felt off, and I didn’t really get into the game until I completely rerolled from scratch. Veilguard just lets you do this as often as you want without needing to spend any resources.

Similarly, you can undo your talent choices and the choices that you make for your companions at any time. Decide you like running with a specific companion, but you really need some sort of healer? You are in luck because pretty much every companion has some sort of healing line that you can invest in. There are a bunch of options that lock off other branches of the tree, but you can just undo all of those choices and try the other branch if you decide you don’t really like it. With your much larger character tree, there are a bunch of times you might want to shift your optimization because you decide that you want a different sort of ability in your loadout, which invalidates a bunch of other choices you made. The game uses a tagging system similar to ARPG games, so if you are using a bunch of abilities with the “Control” tag then you might want to pick up a bunch of other things in the tree that do things for those abilities.

One of the things that I do not love, however… is the gearing system. Namely, my brain interprets the little green sparkly icon as being that there is an upgrade that I should swap to. It is very rare that you will find items that are complete upgrades to other items. Instead, you are going to find a lot of items that are of different item bases, to borrow another term from ARPGs. I wish they clearly identified what sort of base an item is so that I could be on the lookout for new higher-level versions of that base item instead of having to futz with every single item I find. The other weird thing is that you level up the quality tiers of an item… by finding more copies of it. So for example I have a white quality sword… if I find another copy it will turn into green quality, and if I find another after that blue and so on. There is a crafting system but it only increases the bonuses of the item, not the base quality. There is also an enchanting system, but it essentially determines which of several fixed bonuses on an item are unlocked at any given time.

Something that I wish I had noticed sooner was that I could pop over to the world view of the map and fast-travel to any Eluvian without having to go through the crossroads. At first, I was venturing forth into the crossroads anytime I needed to go anywhere in the game, and while this was mildly interesting… it was a bit maddening. I do however need to spend a bit more time in the Crossroads because there are a ton of things to unlock there. There are also a bunch more mirrors than I currently have access to, so I am curious where the campaign will eventually be sending me. Some of them seem to be specifically used for a single mission, and others like the main faction zones are repeatable content that you can visit at any time and explore fully.

One of the things that is a bit weird about the game, is that every companion has some sort of gimmick that they can do to help unlock areas of content in an almost Metroidvania-style manner. Initially, I thought that this meant that it would just give me strong reasons to take specific companions to specific zones so that I could complete puzzles and unlock different areas of these maps. However, once I collected my full set of seven companions… my magical dagger MacGuffin started allowing me to do all of the abilities that related to whoever I did not currently have in my party. Annoyingly I can also do these abilities much faster… than actually having that companion in my party. So this weirdly actually colors my preferences towards never grouping with anyone other than my favorite two companions. Assan the Griffon… responds SO MUCH faster to me when using the dagger… than to Davrin when he is attempting to give commands.

The World is extremely gorgeous and we are getting to see so many areas that we have never been to before. The Antivaan Crows are just as great as we always thought they would be, and it has been interesting seeing the Mourn Watch… a group of Necromancers that feel plucked straight out of the Locked Tomb Series of books. Probably both the coolest thing… and the most jarring is that the game is littered with characters that have appeared in other Dragon Age titles. It is amazing to see these characters again and interact with them again… but the different art style means that generally speaking, they feel like AI Art versions of those characters because the only thing that is really recognizable is the outfit they are wearing. Morrigan for example looks nothing like Morrigan from the other games… Dorian is only vaguely familiar based on his outfit and his mustache. There is a character that I just met that I swear was one of the Deathwatch Dwarves or whatever they were called guarding the bridge and constantly fighting off the Darkspawn in Origins, but I am not finding any references to him.

The world exploration is also quite a bit of fun. There are puzzles but they are basic enough that you can solve them relatively quickly, and won’t be something that you spend hours trying to figure out. I think some of the things that I am enjoying about the game, are some of the aspects that other players are annoyed by. I like that things are relatively light and fast-moving, and do not get bogged down in too much detail. Then again… honestly I remember the other Dragons Age games being fairly similar. They were fun popcorn games, that had enough interesting choices that would allow you to play them multiple times. As much as players talk fondly about it… I don’t really love the extreme number of fail conditions that were laced in the Mass Effect series because it made me feel like I had to follow a guide to make sure that I did not end up losing half of my party permanently during a single quest chain.

I have been having a blast playing through the game, and honestly… I will probably give it a couple of different playthroughs just to see how the other factions shake out. My friends who are also playing the game seem to be enjoying it as well. Essentially my advice is not to allow the internet negativity surrounding this game to color your opinions. I find internet reviews to be less and less valuable these days when it comes to giving me information that actually makes a difference to my enjoyment of something. This honestly… might be my game of the year pending they manage to stick the landing. I went into the experience with fairly low expectations, given how long it took to turn out this game, and how many seeming restarts it had. I have been pleasantly surprised at just how polished the game experience is and how rich the options for playing the game the way you want to play it have been.

Have you been playing Veilguard? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

Stop Personifying Game Studios

September 12, 2023 by Belghast

This morning’s blog post is admittedly going to be a bit of a wild ride. It is a topic that I have been kicking around in my skull for a few weeks now. I hope to do it even half the justice it deserves. Lately, I have been on this binge of consuming the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I’ve been listening to these in Audiobook form while playing Path of Exile, and I love this so much. While I still read books, there is something about listening to the narration while my nervous energies are channeled into a video game that has largely been committed to muscle memory at this point. I feel fully engaged, and it has rapidly become my “happy place”. It also helps that so far this series has been amazing.

I was looking forward to this series because John Scalzi at this point was a known property. I backed into his works differently than most, and the very first novel that I read was Kaiju Preservation Society. I consumed this over the course of a few evenings of staying up well past midnight reading from bed. A few months later I did the same with Redshirts, and after having consumed both… I knew that at some point I would have to read the series he is most known for “Old Man’s War”. This made logical sense because at this point I had consumed two different books from the same author, so it was highly likely that I enjoyed their particular writing style. It was a safe bet because well-established authors tend to bring with them a similar vision to the material that they write.

This does not work for video games. Video Games are a combination of lots of different creatives pouring their energies into a single project. While we love to elevate a single figurehead at a given studio… each game is a snapshot of the state of that company at that very moment. While there are certain tropes that a given studio might have… I can say that Starfield feels like a very “Bethesda” game. I can say this because it is approaching problem-solving in the same way I have experienced in other Bethesda titles. I cannot however state that Starfield is a great experience, because Bethesda created it. It was created by a wide number of individuals who took inspiration from previous titles, but the game being fun and engaging was not a certain thing. I would be surprised if anyone that worked on Fallout New Vegas for example, worked on Starfield. The games were created by wildly different casts of individuals, but we as gamers… have this bad habit of trying to compare them as equivalent products.

So when I approached Diablo IV, I brought with me all of the emotional baggage of having played thousands of hours of games in the Diablo franchise. I also brought with me the emotional baggage of having grown up idolizing Blizzard as a studio. So when I played the game, and it felt bad… it was very hard for me to reign in my disappointment and keep myself from turning into a rabid poo-flinging monkey. I still think that Diablo IV is a bad game, and I think that because I am a core ARPG gamer… and quite frankly the game was never targeting me in the first place. I also think of Blizzard as this storied monolith of a company that encompasses so many fond memories… when in reality they have not produced a new game that I enjoyed since 2013. Sure I enjoyed the heck out of Legion, but that was an expansion to a game that came out in 2004.

Similarly when I approached Mass Effect Andromeda or even Anthem… I brought with me the memories of hundreds of hours spent with each and every Bioware game to that point (save for Jade Empire, I never got into that). I enjoyed Andromeda quite a bit, but it was a pale comparison to the greatness that was achieved over the course of the three games in the Mass Effect trilogy… and even then… they didn’t really stick the landing in that third game. With Anthem I brought my expectations of what a Bioware MMORPG looks like… because Star Wars The Old Republic was a phenomenal experience… and once again I was sadly disappointed. While there was some cross-over between these teams… each game represented a brand new version of what the studio was trying to produce, and as a result, was a completely different product offering.

As gamers, we have this bad habit of personifying Game Studios. We treat them as though the organizational structure itself is capable of pooping out phenomenal game experiences that are similar to those we have had in the past. Sometimes even studios believe this themselves… see the information that came out about the launch of Andromeda and how it was expected that the “Bioware Magic” would somehow pull together a brilliant product in the end. The games that we have loved were snapshots of a moment in time… that may or may not ever happen again. Personifying the Studio as having these indelible properties that can recreate that experience… is only setting us up for heartbreak, disappointment, and eventually failure.

Truth be told… we as gamers with our unrealistic expectations are not entirely to blame for this problem. Game Studios themselves and games media in general are also stoking this fire. How many times have you seen a project being marketed based on where the devs working on it came from before? Hell, the entirety of studios like Dreamhaven seems to be a large dish full of member berries trying to stoke nostalgia about the imagined “good ole days” of a specific studio. The thing is… You would be hard-pressed to find a single game studio out there that does not at least have one person who used to work for Blizzard or Bethesda or Bioware, etc. The game development community is extremely fluid and because of the lack of stability and the tendency to burn a team down after release… means that folks have to go whenever they can to keep a paycheck coming in. Since around 2005, there has never been a time where I have not had at least one close friend working for Blizzard… but the thing is… none of them have really stuck around for more than a few years at a time.

We would be so much better off if we could approach each game that gets released with a fresh set of eyes, and ignore the many-tentacled hype machine. This is part of the reason why folks seem to respond so glowingly to anything that is truly new to them. For example, we are seeing this sort of glow-up happening right now with Baldur’s Gate III, because for so many people Larian Studios was an unknown property. However, for me, I have been playing their games since at least Divinity II, and was definitely there for the fledgling roots of what we are seeing in BG3 with Divinity Original Sin. All of that said though, it is so pure to watch players embrace a game on its own terms… and for its own merit. It is equally heartbreaking when a game that is genuinely good but still a little rough around the edges due to launch constraints, gets memed into oblivion by Streamers and YouTubers.

The hype cycle sometimes inflates a game to proportions that it never could have lived up to. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of these situations, but quite frankly… so was Mass Effect Andromeda. Both were games that given time and attention could be turned into something beautiful. We are seeing this redemption arc with Cyberpunk, but given the financial backlash instead saw with Andromeda the entire Mass Effect series killed off for the better part of a decade. So while I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the gamers for trying to treat the game studios in the same way that I am treating books by a single author… aka John Scalzi. I also blame the studios themselves, the marketing departments, and the 24-hour gaming news cycle desperately seeking anything that even smells a little bit like news in order to fill content deadlines. I fail miserably myself at this all the time, but I also know I would be far happier, or at least less grumpy if I allowed myself to approach everything without expectations.

That is it… that is my soapbox and now I will stand down from it. Expect more blog posts about me talking about some nonsense that I am up to in Path of Exile tomorrow. I can only handle so much seriousness at once, and even with Path of Exile, I have had to deliver myself a dose of realism. I had a lot of hype built up going into the Path of Exile II announcement, only to walk away disappointed and afraid that this game I was pinning my hopes on… was not really going to be what I wanted to play. Instead, now I am trying to stop thinking about it and just enjoy what I enjoy. It feels deeply weird that I am not engaged in the Zeitgeist right now, and not feverishly playing either Baldur’s Gate III or Starfield… while having at the same time enjoyed both. I’m trying to plot my own course independent of FOMO, and right now… my brain craves the familiar rhythms of Path of Exile.

I have no clue what point I was really trying to make this morning, and I definitely doubt that it will make any difference. I hope you have a most excellent day… but now my cats want me to feed them.

Loot Problems

March 11, 2019 by Belghast

Shocking to no one I spent the majority of my weekend playing Anthem again. It was a bizarre weekend for those of us who spent both Friday night and Saturday playing because some things happened. Firstly the the 1.0.3 patch that we were expecting to land on the 12th launched a bit early on the 9th around 7 am, meaning when I woke up for the day I had a significant patch to download. However Friday night… they did the thing where they accidentally set the loot drops too high and we were getting Masterworks left and right. Once again the community thought this was intentional… because ultimately it is what we have been clamoring for all this time. However with the launch of the patch it was rolled back… and it has been a bit hard to separate the good of the patch with the bad of having loot nerfed again.

Anthem has a loot problem, namely that it is way too stingy with Masterworks but more importantly too stingy with Legendaries. All told I have gotten 4 Legendary drops in what is now 164 hours worth of play time. Dividing that out it is me seeing a Legendary drop every 41 hours of play time. There are folks out there who have racked up similar hours and have yet to see a single one. It was the futile hope of the player base that when we removed Whites and Greens from dropping in post 30 content… that it would have a positive effect of skewing the number of Masterworks and Legendaries we would get. However as some testing has shown… essentially every green and white drop was replaced by a purple… which is awesome if you are just getting started but more disenchant fodder once you enter the hunt for Orange and Lime (that’s what I am deciding to call legendary green). There is an interesting post that was up on the reddit over the weekend… where a player farmed 200 drops with +95 luck before and after the patch, linking to the original thread but going to post the data here for reference.

Pre-Patch Numbers

Common: 17 items at 8.5%
Uncommon: 24 items at 12%
Rare: 34 items at 17%
Epic: 102 items at 51%
Masterwork: 21 items at 10.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

Post-Patch Numbers

Rare: 28 items at 14%
Epic: 163 items at 81.5%
Masterwork: 7 items at 3.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

The original poster went to the trouble of documenting all of their loot with screenshots, but accounting for randomness it does appear that the Common and Uncommon slots are now just Epic items, which again is great for people getting a start in the game but bad for anyone who has collected a set of epic gear which now happens frighteningly fast under the current loot environment.

All of that said… I am still enjoying myself and have managed to cobble together gear for three different javelins at this point. I will probably be starting on the Storm at some point soon once I have spent a bit more time fine tuning the Interceptor. Right now I have something that I would call a proper build on both the Ranger and the Colossus, and I will be farming content until I reach that point on the Interceptor as well. How I am getting there… is because I am exploiting the fact that Strongholds drop a guaranteed ability and Legendary contracts drop a guaranteed component. While I only have three legendary contracts available to me each day, it seems that Quickplay on Grandmaster 1 difficulty tends to place you into a Legendary Contract more often than not… and doing this nets you a guaranteed component as well. Stronghold Quickplay similarly nets you a guaranteed ability drop… however in my experience this is bugged out the vast majority of the time and not really worth your effort.

Now I realize there are a lot of players out there that have been having issues with the game nonstop since release. However for the most part I had not… until this weekend when I started heavily relying on Quickplay. That functionality seems to be far more buggy than the rest of the game, and I am wondering if the majority of the issues that players have been encountering have revolved around trying to do this abbreviated path to loot. Normal Quickplay seemed to stick me in far fewer bugged out instances than it did before the patch, however when something went wrong… it went REALLY wrong often times causing me to have to either go through a loop of being bounced back to the loading screen like the above screenshot… or having to hard kill the client. Starting Missions, Contracts, Strongholds and Freeplay myself all resulted in predictably smooth gameplay… however any time I dared to mess with Quickplay I was effectively playing with fire.

Another byproduct of the patch is that overall Javelin power feels like it has increased, and a side effect of that is that none of the lower difficulty ranks seem to be anywhere near as populated as they were. Thalen reported issues getting full groups on normal difficulty as he was playing through the story and leveling, and I personally experienced a challenge getting groups at hard difficulty when I was attempting to finish getting the epics on my Interceptor. So one of two things has happened… either the average player has released that they can now crush Grandmaster 1 thanks to the power scaling, or more likely a lot of players have just stopped messing with the game out of frustration over various issues. Neither case is great for the game as a whole because it makes it harder and harder to onboard a supply of new players. Grace will be starting up this week and I will be curious to see how that experience is as a new player and whether or not the matchmaking is as quick as it was for the rest of us that started out. Side note since I have done this pretty much every week, throwing out a screenshot of the Alliance contribution screen… I have yet to hit the hard cap for the week.

One final screenshot of note… since I played a bit of Warframe this weekend… I am pretty sure these two chests in the hanger area are a nod to that game. Anyone has played much Warframe will notice that they have a lot of lockers scattered throughout the ships that look suspiciously similar to these. Also oddly enough playing a lot of Anthem has somehow made Warframe feel more manageable? I was not nearly as motion sick playing it yesterday as I have been in the past, and the way too zoomed in perspective did not feel anywhere near as bad as it had after playing the whirling ball of death that is the Interceptor. I still greatly prefer Anthem, but I have a feeling I could probably start to finally delve into Warframe if I so choose.

So where we are left is that Anthem needs to make a lot of changes quickly. Chad Robertson the Head of Live Services chimed in over on twitter with some comments to this whole situation. It spans several tweets so quoting rather than just pasting the thread for ease of consumption.

We appreciate all the feedback from the community on the game. We love the passion and share it. We’re not yet fully happy with the game’s loot behavior either. One of the downsides of moving so fast to improve is that we’re making changes to complex loot systems in several areas and it’s then harder to know how it’s performing. In the next few months, we’re expecting to make significant changes, but we’re starting with some incremental ones so we can better navigate that evolution. Our goal is to ensure the best possible player experience.

So while I appreciate this comment, because they are actually saying words in reference to problems… which is a step above a lot of studios out there. The biggest problem that I have with this comment is the fact that he mentions the time frame of “the next few months”. I am not entirely certain that they have months… and more likely have weeks to sort this out before players simply give up and file this game in the bin of “check back for year two” like so many of us did with Destiny. We already see the signs in matchmaking of players dropping out of the system, which is a bad sign. Additionally the temperature of the Reddit has shifted drastically over the last few days, which was a different situation than the inflammatory YouTube community… they were positive and hopeful and I think were pinning their hopes on the patch from March 12th fixing a lot of the major issues… namely with loot drops. That however has drastically shifted to a community demanding fixes now, because Patch 1.0.3 did not deliver the solace they were hoping for. While I am still playing the hell out of this game… I cannot say they are necessarily wrong in their frustrations.

There have been two situations where supposedly accidental loot changes have “fixed” the game. In both times the game felt so much better because it didn’t feel bad when you got another Masterwork with crappy rolls, because you knew another one was right around the corner. The unbridled excitement of actually seeing a legendary drop, and knowing that this wasn’t a once in a career thing… made you care less about also getting crappy rolls on it too. Loot needs to flow like water Diablo 3 style so you can pick through the dross and cobble together something resembling a proper build. Nothing is more frustrating than getting a bunch of abilities you don’t care about… when you have a specific style of play that you enjoy on your character… but feel forced to use the Masterworks because the item level increase makes them just flat out superior to using a proper build. All of this felt less of the case when the loot was accidentally generous… and the players will not be satisfied until we get something resembling that state again.